By Frank Antosiewicz
CORRESPONDENT
Published: March 21, 2014 12:22 pm ET
Updated: March 21, 2014 12:25 pm ET
Lacerta Group Inc. continues to boost its manufacturing capacity, adding two Sencorp Ultra thermoformers and a clean room for medical device packaging.
“We actually purchased a building a year ago, which is 75,000 square feet … so we have more space to expand our manufacturing,” said President Ali Lotfi, in a phone interview.
He said the new building, in the same industrial park as the company’s headquarters plant in Mansfield, Mass., gives Lacerta about 130,000 square feet of combined space. The company has 110 employees, with 12 thermoforming machines.
Lacerta makes packaging for the food, medical, cosmetic, pharmaceutical, consumer/retail and industrial/electronic industries. Products include clamshells, blisters, trays and displays.
The company has been keeping pace with the growth by adding five thermoformers and 35 new workers in the past two years. The new clean room is due to be complete in mid-April.
Lacerta has two other clean rooms, which contain thermoforming equipment.
Lotfi said the company has had double-digit growth for the past five years and expects to grow about 25 percent in 2014. Obtaining ISO 9001:2008 certification has also been a big boost.
He stressed that the company has been much more than just a thermoformer. It has a design department, as well as eight CNC machines for in-house mold making. Turnkey services include package development, distortion printing, contract packaging, fulfillment shipping and assembly.
“Part of the reason for our growth is that we invest heavily in the company and we have very good design and mold making … we have a strong team of people who focus on the customer,” he said.
Lacerta works with a multitude of plastics including PET, recycled PET, glycol-modified PET, high impact polystyrene, polyurethane, ABS, polypropylene and PVC.
He said Lacerta works with customers to help them find the right material for their packaging. For example, it worked with a cosmetic company that wanted to lower its carbon footprint, and they found that recycled PET was the right choice.
Lacerta also has a 30,000-square-foot facility near Mexico City that it established in January 2012. That plant has five thermoformers and five injection molding machines and supplies mostly to its Mexican customers. | 
